Official Street View Website

Saturday, March 21, 2009

There used to be some Street View coverage for Canada, but it has been removed. The Google car has certainly been to Canada, but all Canadian Street View imagery has been kept off of the Internet.

However, past events in Street View history show that Canadian Street View might not be too far away.

As you may have heard, MapJack and Canpages have teamed up to produce street-level panoramas for Canada already. This is similar to previous companies trying to outdo Google.

EveryScape released imagery for the city of Washington on April 7, 2008. On November 4, Google released imagery for Washington, Baltimore, and Seattle. EveryScape hasn't made the news since.

Seety released imagery for London on October 16, 2008. On March 18, 2009, Google released imagery for all major cities in the United Kingdom, along with more American, Dutch, French, Italian, and Spanish locations. Seety is no longer updating their website.

If Google continues to impress us with tremendous updates like those, we could expect Canadian Street View to show up in time for the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver.

However, there is one thing I feel I must remind you about: there have been no major Street View car sightings anywhere in Canada yet, so please don't get too excited. This blog's predictions on the right only include locations where Google cars have been spotted.

Also, there must be a reason why Google imagery stops right at the Canadian border. We'll have to find out, eh?

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

EveryScape has continued to update their website and their imagery. They may not have "made the news" but then again they never really were big news. Google SV has photographed some U.S. locations and their imagery is very poor. EveryScape's imagery is superior in some locations at this point in time, so I still use EveryScape to view those areas. Hopefully, Google will replace imagery for areas like Los Angeles (which isn't on EveryScape, either, but is a spectactular example of some of Google's worst resolution imagery).

As for Seety - you're not really correct about this site. Their only purpose from the get-go was to photograph central London, and there was never an update once they launched their website. I wrote to them to ask if they would ever expand and they said they had no intention of doing so unless someone wanted to pay them to do it. I'm not sure if I'm correct on this but the Italian website http://www.visual.paginegialle.it/ which has continued to add imagery for many Italian cities is rumored to have been photographed by Seety.

You may be correct that Google will photograph Canada, since there is now a precedent, but if you'll notice with Canpages you can't actually directly access the Street View feature for it; you have to conduct a search.

Correction to the above post - I said "Google SV has photographed some U.S. locations and their imagery is very poor." Of course I know there is Street View imagery for nearly the entire contiguous U.S. and that some of it is very good (the European imagery is superior, though - why is that?) - I just meant to say EveryScape has some imagery superior to some locations on U.S. Street View.